I'd argue that Rust is much closer to C++ than to C or ML.
Rust was designed by C++ programmers, to replace code that was previously written in C++. The concept that most guides its design is the idea of "zero cost abstractions", which a very C++ thing as well. ML doesn't mind if abstractions have a cost, while C is a smaller and more spartan language.
Agreed with the commenter elsewhere in this thread that Zig seems like a more reasonable contender for a modernized descendant of C.